Tracing the Modernist Roots of Ecological Thinking—Reflections on Conversations with W. S. Merwin

Abstract

is an early and eerily prescient visionary about global sustainability and ecological activism, and a giant of World Letters, whose career spans eight decades and whose prodigious contributions total more than forty volumes of poetry, essays, memoirs, and prose. Few living writers have been as consistently productive as this quintessential Man of the Environment, known as much for his original poetry, prose, and landmark translations, as he is for his writings about ecosystems and environmental, indeed planetary, degradation.

Merwin Across Borders

“…Similarly, in an interview collected in Conversations with W.S. Merwin (2015), the poet stated: "the part of you that's writing propaganda is always there" (95). Therefore, Al Hodathy identified a responsibility across borders shared by the two writers.…”

Cultural Appropriation in Bioregionalism and the Need for a Decolonial Ethics of Place

“…The form of this structure is an ethic of incommensurability—a non‐exploitative, non‐appropriation‐based way to create alliances between settler and Indigenous activists—in order to create capacity for bioregional organizations to reorient their connection to Indigenous spirituality and guide their political agenda away from accommodating settler colonialism. The final section uses an ethic of incommensurability to interpret Wendell Berry—a regional writer who is considered along with Gary Snyder to be one of “the acknowledged figureheads of [the bioregional] tradition in the English‐speaking world” (Wutz and Crimmel 2017, 190)—as one example of what rehabilitating bioregionalism looks like. The upshot is seeing how this ethic is a decolonial move that unsettles settler futurity in order to open a more fragile, vulnerable space in which bioregionalism can operate.…”